It is time once again for the latest installment of "Eric Talks About Important Cultural Centers of the World," which is a title that should signal to everyone that I will be talking about New York. (If I desired to talk about, say, France, I would instead use a title like "Do Not Read This, It Will Be Boring and About France.")
If you are like a lot of people, right now you are thinking, "Am I honestly supposed to believe information on world cultures from someone who has knowingly run into the path of an oncoming taxi?" Well, the answer to your question, Ms. Chock Full o' Doubts, is an emphatic "yes." Any urban scholar will tell you that accidents involving taxicabs are quite frequent, although it is widely acknowledged that nearly all of them (the accidents) to date might have been avoided had pedestrians not incorrectly decided to try to use the sidewalk.
I wish, for everyone's sake, that life in New York (State Bird: Dirt) were as simple as being chased down by out-of-control vehicles. But sadly, it is not. The fact is, New York is home to another menace. A menace so incomprehensible that every time I think about it, it seems foreign to me. A menace so great and ubiquitous that it could never be summed up in just a single word. The menace is not North Dakota. I am referring, of course, to weather.
Toward the middle of the recent summer, we New Yorkers suffered through a miserable heat wave, where for several weeks it felt as if the entire state had been picked up off of its moorings and deposited somewhere far closer to the equator, such as Hell. And apparently, as I discovered, there is also this thing called humidity, which stems from the Latin words "humid" (meaning "lots of"), and "ity" (meaning "water in the air but how does it get up there? My friends and I have no idea"). One day the humidity was reportedly 100 percent, which basically meant that the only people qualified to leave their homes were Olympic swimmers. Conditions were so bad that even the National Weather Advisory Board, upon looking out the window, melted and drowned.
Although they have lately experienced weather, not to mention a recent onslaught of -- and this is an actual fact -- killer mosquitoes, most New Yorkers remain unflappable. Try as you will, you will not be able to flap them. Even if you happen to be a hurricane.
If you are not sure as to whether or not you are a hurricane, ask yourself the following questions:
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Can I carry furniture?
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Hundreds of feet over the Atlantic?
If you answered "yes" to either question, then you may be a hurricane. Now answer the following question: Is your name Floyd? If so, then you are probably the hurricane that threatened the entire Eastern Seaboard last week, in which case I am mad at you.
Weather people had been talking about Hurricane Floyd, named after famous boxer Floyd "Hurricane" Floyd, for what seemed like an eternity, which is a very long time even by weather people standards. Ever fulfilling their collective duty as concerned meteorologists, they searched high and low for meteors, possibly to hurl at Floyd if he got too close to the studio.
Also, for the benefit of the public, these same concerned meteorologists shared their insights through important and informative safety warnings such as "Look out! Hurricane!" Except that there was usually someone standing there telling you this, live via satellite, from the exact spot where the hurricane was scheduled to be destroying houses and children and livestock in a matter of nanoseconds. Which led one to believe that either this person was Super Aqua Wind Resistant Reporter Person, or that the whole hurricane thing was just an expensive and elaborate commercial hoax, which makes sense if you think about it, because after all it was from Florida.
In any event, Sir Hurricane Floyd proved to be the leading cause of me not being able to leave my home for an entire day. In addition, area schools shut down and airports terminated all flights. Sometimes in midair. The impending natural disaster took the entire City of New York, usually made up of many districts (i.e. the Midtown District, the Garment District, the Brooklyn District, the District of Columbia District, etc.), and turned it all into one big unified district (the Floyd Fear District). Which, incidentally, sounds a lot like a movie about witches.
Herr Floyd did touch down eventually, on a 10-yard pass from Brett Favre, but did not do much else worthy of note before I fell asleep. It did rain a little near where I was (the living room). There was also a bit of wind, for show. The following morning, however, I witnessed on television several reports of serious damage, mainly in coastal regions, along with pictures of seriously uprooted trees, and accounts of brief but serious power outages. North Carolina especially was experiencing flooding. Being ever the high-minded sleuth that I am, I quickly put two and two together. Somehow taxis had gotten out there.
